Disk drive storage has been on a continuing curve of increasing recording density. However, the system requirements to retrieve data at faster rates have driven storage devices to have increased data transfer rates and reduced data retrieval access times. This has resulted in disk drives having higher rotational speed (typically measured in rotations per minute, RPM) of the magnetic media and actuators having faster seek times. Presently, magnetic hard disk drives operate at a data rate and access time independent of the type of data stored on the media. All data is treated as random alphanumeric data. Therefore these systems balance data rate, access time and recording density. The recording density and the access time is not optimized to the type of data stored.
There are numerous techniques to increase the recording density of a media surface such as zone recording which optimizes the linear density of each zone by changing the recording frequency. Such a technique is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,087,992 wherein the frequency is set within each zone to the maximum error rates that does not exceed a selected value. Another technique is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,514,771 where the rotational speed of the disk is varied as the recording transducer is translated across the disk surface to maximize the linear density on each track. Another technique is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,357,635 where either the rotation speed of the disk or the recording frequency is varied to achieve the maximum linear density on all tracks. Another technique is to adjust the error rate to the type of data stored.